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Blogs & Stories

SpiderLabs Blog

Attracting more than a half-million annual readers, this is the security community's go-to destination for technical breakdowns of the latest threats, critical vulnerability disclosures and cutting-edge research.

Trustwave SpiderLabs: My First Nine Days

So as some of you may have heard I now work at Trustwave for their SpiderLabs group headed up by Nicholas Percoco. I've learned a lot in the last nine days most of which is that Trustwave is almost nothing that I thought they were, but that is a very good thing.

The biggest surprises for me are that Trustwave is huge, well, huge compared to the size I thought they were, they've been around longer than I thought and they do a lot more stuff than I thought. They have around seven hundred employees; spread all over the world, been doing this since 1995 and they do just about everything related to Information security.

Their longevity to me speaks volumes, if you were around in the second half of the nineties you know that security companies were a dime a dozen back then, very few of them have survived and those that are still around have become extremely specialized.

I'll be honest; I don't think I really understood the breadth of Trustwave's offerings when I accepted the job. Sure they do a lot of PCI stuff but they are also a CA, do internal and external pen testing, code review, forensics, malware analysis, even physical security, and a ton of other stuff.

SpiderLabs, where I'll be working, is sort of like the R&D arm of Trustwave. These are the guys that get their hands dirty deep in code or hardware. These are the guys doing the pen testing, the malware analysis or the forensics among other things.

But it's the little things in the office that stand out to me, various hacker con stickers posted to cubicle walls, conversations that include phrases such as "floating point string", "remote code execution" or quotes from Spider-Man comics, conference rooms with names like Acid Burn and Crash Overdrive and Zero Cool. (Yes, those are stupid character names but as conference rooms it oddly works well) It all reminds me that like-minded smart people are now all around me.

I am truly very excited to be here, probably the first job I have actually been excited about in over a decade. One of the cool things I get to do is write on this blog so keep an eye out for new posts. But the biggest thing that has gotten me excited about working here is the future. Trustwave has big plans for big things just around the corner for new products, updates to existing products and lots of other cool stuff. Of course that means they also need more people. Check out the listings, who knows maybe you can be one of the smart people around me.